Alien Nation
By Peter Brimelow

E pluribus unum no more? Like most other recent immigrants, former Englishman Brimelow thinks U.S. immigration policy badly needs reforming. Immigration is too high to begin with, he says, but also too many unskilled workers are coming, legally as well as illegally, as are too many persons whose ethnicities differ from the U.S. norm of predominantly European extractions. Brimelow maintains that besides the ill effects present immigration has on law enforcement, social service provision, public health, and the environment, it is undermining the sense of the U.S. as a nation. But we've always been "a nation of immigrants," you say? Brimelow documents that that is true only in that the American people, like the people of every other nation we know of, came from somewhere else. Moreover, throughout American history, immigration has occurred, not continuously, but in several waves that have alternated with long periods of assimilation--this is the pattern that built the nation and that the immigration tsunami touched off by the 1965 Immigration Act and complicated by the political resistance to assimilation known as multiculturalism has broken. The U.S. badly needs to drastically reduce immigration now, absorb the last 30 years' worth of new Americans, and rethink its immigration policies, Brimelow concludes, or it may dissolve into a bunch of smaller countries, in some of which democracy as we enjoy it will not survive. Writing in the magnetically readable, "sledgehammer" (his term) style of his principal employer, Forbes, Brimelow is sure to fuel the debates on U.S. immigration policy in the months ahead.

"One of the most widely discussed books of the year."
-Jerry Adler, Newsweek

"An indispensable book.... Either side may profitably imbibe this bottled brio. Makes a powerful-indeed,, nearly overwhelming-case against the status quo."
- Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times, in Atlantic Monthly

"Raw meat that will offend politically correct members of the cultural elite. It may also strike a responsive chord with a great many ordinary Americans."
-Stephan Thernstrom, Washington Post

"A brilliant book."
- Edwin A. Roberts, Tampa Tribune
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"I have also been an 'open immigration' advocate... [but] Alien Nation has persuaded me ... to call for an immediate suspension of all immigration."
-William B. Allen., former chairman. Commission on Civil Rights, in Detroit News and Free Press

"A book not to be missed.... Every American citizen owes a debt of gratitude to Peter Brimelow."
-William A. Rusher, Washington Times

"Important.... Many of the facts given in this book will be surprising even to well-informed readers."
-Nathan Glazer Harvard University

"Deserves praise for going to the heart of the immigration issue."
-Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and The Last Man

"His fear is justified. We will bury him."
-Lawrence Chua, Village Voice

Peter Brimelow is a senior editor at Forbes and National Review magazines in New York. He is the author of The Patriot Game: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited.

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